Fatal shot during hobby hunting: Vaud man convicted

A hobby hunter over 80 years old has been convicted by the court in Yverdon of negligent homicide and given a suspended custodial sentence of ten months, after he shot and killed a companion in November 2024 during a hobby hunt for wild boar in the Gros-de-Vaud.

Wild beim Wild editorial team — 21 May 2026

A hobby hunter aged over 80 has been convicted of negligent homicide by the court in Yverdon and given a suspended prison sentence of ten months for shooting a fellow hunter dead during a wild boar hunt in the Gros-de-Vaud in November 2024.

What happened on the day of the incident

The eighty-year-old was out on a hobby hunt for wild boars together with six other people. When the game took cover on a scrub-covered rise, he climbed up onto this knoll. To flush out the wild boars and keep them away from his dog, he fired two shots towards the ground.

One of the shots, however, did not lodge in the soil. The projectile struck a fellow hunter standing below the rise, hitting him fatally in the head. Any help came too late for the man.

The verdict and the Swiss legal framework

The Yverdon court found the hobby hunter guilty of negligent homicide, an offence under Article 117 of the Swiss Criminal Code, and imposed a suspended prison sentence of ten months. Suspended means that the sentence will only be enforced if the convicted person reoffends during the probationary period.

The canton of Vaud operates a licence hunting system. Unlike territorial hunting, which applies in some German-speaking cantons, here anyone holding a cantonal licence may hunt across the entire canton, without being tied to a fixed hunting ground or to ongoing management responsibilities. The relevant legislation comprises the federal hunting act (JSG), the cantonal hunting legislation and the Animal Welfare Act (TSchG).

Not a tragic one-off, but a pattern

Hobby hunters like to portray such cases as the unavoidable residual risk of a responsible leisure pursuit. The figures tell a different story. Since the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention began keeping records in 2000, more than 100 people have lost their lives in connection with hobby hunting in Switzerland. In purely statistical terms, a hunting accident occurs every 29 hours, and roughly every three and a half months someone is killed in one.

Analyses of accident insurance data for 2016 to 2020 record around 300 recognised accidents, with annual costs of approximately 3.6 million francs. What is decisive is what these statistics fail to capture: they cover only employees with mandatory accident insurance. Retired hobby hunters are missing entirely, even though they account for a large proportion of armed individuals in the field. The shooter convicted in this case was himself over 80 years old — a profile that does not appear in the official figures at all. The true scale of this hidden statistic is shown in our dossier on hunting accidents in Switzerland as well as in the statistics on fatal hunting accidents.

The Geneva model shows that there is another way

The canton of Geneva abolished hobby hunting back in 1974. There, the regulation of wildlife populations is carried out by trained, salaried state game wardens. Fatal shooting accidents among hobby hunters, like the one now in Gros-de-Vaud, are simply impossible under this system, because no large group of armed recreational shooters is out and about in the countryside. In the canton of Vaud, a similar initiative failed in 1977. The Geneva model is therefore not an isolated special case that cannot be replicated, but proof — established over more than fifty years — that professional wildlife management can work without leaving a residual fatal risk to humans.

As long as tens of thousands of armed hobby hunters are shooting in a densely used landscape, the next fatality is not a question of if, but when.